Best of the Web: Are they on to something?

Taranto's going off on abortion today....not on pro life v pro choice, just on an interesting byproduct..

Quantifying the Roe Effect
Regular readers of this column know that for some time we have been pushing a pet theory about the political effect of abortion. We refer not to the issue of abortion but to the practice, and our theory is that abortion is making America more conservative than it otherwise would be.

We base this on two assumptions. First, that liberal and Democratic women are more likely to have abortions. Second, that children's political views tend to reflect those of their parents--not exactly, of course, and not in every case, but on average. Thus abortion depletes the next generation of liberals and eventually makes the population more conservative. We call this the Roe effect, after Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court's 1973 decision that established a constitutional right to abortion.

Some critics have objected that this is pure conjecture, but a new study by the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a pro-choice research group named for a onetime Planned Parenthood head, contains data that bolster the first assumption. We briefly noted the study yesterday, and now we've taken a look at the Guttmacher data for all 50 states. They show that there is indeed a statistical correlation between how a state voted in 2000 and its teen abortion statistics for each year.

Guttmacher actually produced two sets of abortion statistics: the abortion rate, or the number of abortions among girls and women age 15-19 for each 1,000 women of that age range, and the abortion ratio, the number of abortions in that age range divided by the number of pregnancies that ended in either live birth or abortion. In brief, the rate is the likelihood that any young woman will get pregnant and have an abortion, while the ratio is the likelihood that a pregnant young woman will have an abortion rather than carry her child to term.

We've prepared a pair of tables showing the ranking of the states by abortion rate and ratio along with the candidate who carried the state in 2000 and his margin of victory. You can also find the original Guttmacher study here (link in PDF); the table from which we drew the data appears on page 8. Some interesting findings:

Of the 10 states with the highest teen abortion rates, Al Gore carried eight, and all by more than 10%. George W. Bush narrowly carried the remaining two, Nevada (by 3.5%) and Florida (by less than 0.1%).


Similarly, of the 11 states with the highest teen abortion ratios, Gore carried nine, all but one (Washington by 5.6%) by more than 10%. Bush carried two, by small margins: New Hampshire (by 1.3%) and Florida.


Of the 20 states with the lowest teen abortion rates, Gore carried only five: Maine, Vermont, Minnesota, Iowa and Wisconsin.


Bush carried every one of the 20 states with the lowest teen abortion ratios.


The District of Columbia, which Gore carried by 76.2%, had a higher teen abortion rate than any state, and a higher teen abortion ratio than any state except New Jersey and New York. (It is tied with Massachusetts.)


The state that gave Bush his biggest margin, Utah (40.5%), had the lowest teen abortion rate and tied with Kentucky for the lowest teen abortion ratio.


Wyoming, where Bush had his second biggest victory margin (40.1%), is something of an outlier. It ranked 14th, the third-highest among Bush states, in both teen abortion rate and ratio.
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okay, this has something interesting to say, except it has a couple of logical flaws:
1) it assumes simply that liberals will not have more kids. just because you have an abortion, does not mean you won't have more kids. it assumes because liberals have more abortions, they won't have more kids overall. this is far from proven.
2) just because you do not have abortions, does not necessarily mean that you have more kids overall.
3) higher birthrates are sometimes attributed to minorities which are predominantly democratic: irish, east indian, italian, hispanic. in fact, if anything, the white protestant WASP population is becoming less and less significant in america. and that's the key demographic for the republicans.
4) the correlation between parental political leanings and their kids politics is far from rock solid. this has to be researched further, since my own unscientific poll leads me to believe otherwise.

anyways, its interesting nonetheless. food for thought.